Pace rounding (Read 108 times)

I do wish that pace rounding would get fixed some day. For example a pace ending in 18.08 (18 seconds and 8 one -hundredths of a second) shouldn't round to 19 seconds, but rather to 18 seconds. This has been an annoyance of mine for years. Everything is arbitrarily rounded up.

For greatest accuracy the following is the type of rounding we used in physics:

"This rule provides more accuracy and is sometimes referred to as the 'Banker's Rule'. When the first digit dropped is 5 and there are no digits following or the digits following are zeros, make the preceding digit even (i.e. round off to the nearest even digit). E.g., 2.315 and 2.325 are both 2.32 when rounded off to the nearest hundredth.Note:The rationale for the third rule is that approximately half of the time the number will be rounded up and the other half of the time it will be rounded down."

Namely 0 is not rounded, 1,2,3 & 4 round down, and 6, 7, 8 & 9 round up. So which way 5 rounds depends on the preceding digit in order to minimize bias.

Well, RunningAhead records the duration to hundredths of a second in one column and pace (rounded up to the next second) in another column. The mile splits end up not agreeing with other products, such as GarminConnect.

Well, RunningAhead records the duration to hundredths of a second in one column and pace (rounded up to the next second) in another column. The mile splits end up not agreeing with other products, such as GarminConnect.

There's the problem.

Do they have to agree?

If a standard qualifying time was 18.00 and you ran an 18.08, you did not qualify.

The pain that hurts the worse is the imagined pain. One of the most difficult arts of racing is learning to ignore the imagined pain and just live with the present pain (which is always bearable.) - Jeff

I know the rounding rules apply to hand-timed and road racing finish times, but are there USATF rules about rounding average pace? I sorta doubt it. Not that this really matters much or that RA is in "error" and needs to be fixed. But I am not so sure that there is an established convention on avg. pace-rounding, since avg. pace is not an official result...

I wanted to check this out, so I sorta searched around different sites for results:

The USATF club nationals XC results do round paces upwards in the same way that RA does.

The road racing timing equipment seems to be able to do this in different ways, and road racing results that I saw reflect inconsistency in this.

It doesn't round mile splits up, it rounds pace. Which sorta makes sense to me. If you ever round pace down it would indicate a time for a race or split or run that wasn't actually achieved. The rule of thumb in recording running time is to ensure that you never report at time that's faster than what was actually run, for obvious reasons.

It's totally trivial in the context of a running log and I can't believe I'm in this thread, but hey. That's how I see it: there's nothing that needs to "get fixed" here.

Given that RA displays pace in whole seconds, rounding is needed. Rounding up may irk you because you appear to run slower, rounding down yields an impossible pace, even if it's "close enough". Given the two, I opted to play it safe.